


wake up and worship

by blurhawaii



Category: Kraken - China Mieville
Genre: Fictional Religion & Theology, M/M, Missing Scene, Post-Canon, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:42:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27894763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blurhawaii/pseuds/blurhawaii
Summary: Chromatophores danced like a heartbeat. Dane’s, Billy noted absently, cocooned entirely within the shell of his hands, as delicate as blood. It brought to mind the surface of the kraken, unnaturally stretched into a shape people recognised, chemical slick, and wholly unpleasant to the touch. Alive and dead. The difference being a gaping chasm. Whatever it was that Billy did with glass, whatever magic trick he'd stumbled onto, it was a poor substitute to holding Dane's beating heart in his hands.The very idea of being able to capture its living quality permanently was laughable.
Relationships: Billy Harrow/Dane Parnell
Comments: 3
Kudos: 6
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	wake up and worship

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tahanrien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tahanrien/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! Hope you enjoy it.
> 
> The title comes from The Great Gold Sheep by The Mountain Goats, which I basically listened to on a loop while writing this. Along with Rat Queen, because they made me think of Dane and Billy, respectively.

Rain had slicked Dane’s shirt to his shoulders and made their broad slope appear impossibly more severe. He held a set of dry clothes out to Billy, for once age and temperament appropriate, while he stood and dripped. Billy took them in hand but made no effort to change into them because his own clothes were a layer of cold, damp shielding. A feeling of heaviness. The awful chill, a subcutaneous fact of nature, not so easily shaken off. It would not be unfathomable to think of it as a form of krakenist self-flagellation, a one step closer to god type deal, if not for the ease Dane then slipped off his own shirt and shivered.

Time sucked in, bent back, resumed without a care, all while Billy watched him dress.

For Dane recognised Billy’s hesitation for exactly what it was; a morbid stumble over ownership, of all things. To put it more simply, an unwillingness to loot from the dead.

Understanding passed between them as readily as it had from the very beginning, back when they were co-workers and Billy's attempts at friendliness were getting brushed off every morning, to his increasing dismay. It never stopped him from trying again the next day, reaching out while Dane pulled tantalizingly away. Because he understood, in a far back place in his brain, that the rebuffs were more of a _not yet_ than a _never_.

“There’s a difference between being dead and being not born,” Dane said to him now. “Put on the shirt, Billy, before you get sick.”

He was still thinking about it later, stretched out dry and warm across the floor with Dane sitting guard next to him. This flat was a refuge held in permanent suspension, forever waiting for someone who was never coming home. Peppered with books that were never going to be read. Picture frames housing loved ones that never existed. They were here now just to fill in the gaps. It was the theory of object permanence in practise. What did this place become when their presence wasn't here to flavour it?

Billy thought of his own flat and whether he’d ever get to go back. If he’d even want to. Leon had ended there, a line like a sound wave with a sudden and deafening stop; dead by anyone’s definition but also just _gone_. There was a distinct difference there, according to Dane. “You remember your friend for as long as you can, but you also move on,” he said, like a man with experience.

It hadn’t sat right with Billy, even then.

Made him remember an earlier conversation, a different night spent in a room that was holding its breath for no one. How Dane was always so patient with him. Explaining legs to a fish could frustrate even the most well-wishing of people, but Dane had stayed up with him almost every night since they’d been together, just talking. His faith was a layer of inorganic matter embedded under his skin, it kept him warm at night. Like a blanket, he never seemed to mind sharing it with Billy.

“What about if you’re not a good little follower, Dane? Say you betray your cephalopod brothers and sisters, run off in the middle of the night with something holy secreted away in your back pocket? What happens to you then?”

“Are you worried about my cold, damp soul, Billy?”

“What I’m saying is, is it like--” Billy dared a gesture vaguely upwards, towards where logically there should be an eternity of air, diffused with light, and a graceful weightlessness of limbs. Something like that trick all children learn where they push their wrists out against a doorframe, only to feel their arms then float to the heavens of their own accord. If an all consuming dark is where Dane wished to lay his head for all time, it only stood to reason that the opposite would feel like a failure in faith, correct?

Dane followed his lazy point, smiled and shook his head. He continued to find a kind of paradoxical pleasure in Billy’s adherence to up is up and down is where fire licks at your heels. As if the very opposite was something to roll your eyes at. It was the normality of it that really tickled him, as though regular old Billy was something he’d never seen before; a freckled endangered species trailing _him_ , the oddity, through the woods instead.

“It’s not a barter system, Billy,” he said. “A scare tactic to lull little squidlings into eating their vegetables. Good and bad simply ain’t things that concern it.”

“But before, you said--” Billy raised his arm again from his position flat on his back, poised his fingers to snap and then faltered. He couldn’t do what Dane could, couldn’t bring light to the surface of his skin to emulate something godly. A flash of phosphor in a rubbery cell. A kiddie knack Dane teased--or a possible heaven. Weird how the two were able to overlap like that. 

But Dane could have magicked a brine encrusted coin out from behind Billy’s ear with the same casual affectation, it still would have thrilled Billy in the same way. Because he couldn’t explain it. And he didn't want to. Schrödingerian rules applied when it came to knacking. You crack open the box and it spoils the trick. The power came from throwing the tactile in with the intangible, stirring it up and waiting to see what stuck. From the very little that Billy understood, knacking worked mainly because it shouldn’t.

“They’re just stories, Billy,” Dane said. Things granddads told their grandchildren because their dads weren’t around to say them. Dane drew his knee close to his chest as an afterthought, dangled his arm across it. The real estate of thigh and forearm towered over Billy on the floor. Boxed him in. Dane continued in a hushed voice, an old rehearsed reverence. “Some of us like to be gifted to the sea when we die, but I always wondered, what the hell would the almighty God Kraken want with my empty shell?”

_Us_ , Dane said without equivocation, and Billy wondered if that was maybe the reason Dane didn’t feel too concerned about his soul. You could take the squid man out of the cult and all that. And while he swore up and down it was not a barter system, Dane definitely put more into his faith than he ever seemed to get out of it. There must be a kind of solace in that, Billy guessed, for a martyr.

With a noise like shifting cartilage in the silence, Dane snapped his fingers. There was no foreign current that travelled down the span of his arm. No eerie slide that said there was something otherworldly transposed under his skin. Light simply unfurled from his fingertips like a drop of ink centered in water. Sourced entirely from within, moving out. It flared for a moment and then bled away. Left them in semi-darkness again, save for the glow of the streetlights outside the window.

An idea sparked in Billy once all he had left of the light was his memory of it. Sparked similarly in the palms of his hands too, something intangible he would like to try and make solid.

“Do it again,” Billy said, pushing himself up onto his elbows.

Dane peered down at him, the full bared length of Billy’s body, before settling his arm more firmly over his knee. His fingers almost brushed against Billy’s chest with him sitting up like that, almost but not quite. “Like this one, do you?” he asked, coy. He snapped again before Billy could say anything in his defence. Like yes, he did in fact like it.

Percussion rolled through him; bioluminescence bloomed.

This time Billy leaned in and cupped his hands around the light, just like he would a flame he didn’t want to go out. The intent was to bottle it up, make it permanent. Preserving it preferably alive and pulsing, as far removed from its formalin dowsed ancestors as Billy could manage. Not even daring to use his time clench to keep it around a second longer. Dane caught on fairly quickly, smiling in that bemused way he reserved for Billy’s zigzag thinking, and he left his bright hand to linger between both of Billy’s, openly curious about the outcome.

It wasn’t anything like Billy’s other experiences with knacking. All the other times he had been able to shift the universe over into his way of thinking, it had been a clutch. A moment of great importance, a matter of life and death. Skins saved only thanks to Billy’s tensed muscles and blind panic. Here, he was warm and safe under Dane’s watchful eye. His hulking mass Billy's personal blanket of faith.

Chromatophores danced like a heartbeat. Dane’s, Billy noted absently, cocooned entirely within the shell of his hands, as delicate as blood. It brought to mind the surface of the kraken, unnaturally stretched into a shape people recognised, chemical slick, and wholly unpleasant to the touch. Alive and dead. The difference being a gaping chasm. Whatever it was that Billy did with glass, whatever magic trick he'd stumbled onto, it was a poor substitute to holding Dane's beating heart in his hands.

The very idea of being able to capture its living quality permanently was laughable.

“Shit,” Billy said when the curve of his fingers failed to move or tilt the light in a way that proved he had it in his grasp. “This is way less Mr Miyagi-ish than I’d hoped. I have no idea what I’m doing.”

“The trick is persuasion," Dane said and, somewhere along this process, without Billy noticing, he had grown tense. "You need to convince it, Billy. Convince it that it wants to stick around forever, to keep the dark from ever creeping in.”

Simple, right?

“But it’s you," Billy said. "Or, at least a part of you. I'm convincing you?"

"Am I the universe?"

"You're a part of it, yeah."

"Then okay," Dane said, stone faced. "Convince me."

Billy would later recall that night as a newborn, feeling like an outsider looking in.

Along with the ghost that already haunted that flat, Billy would also return again and again. Would watch from the edges as the other Billy sat up fully, tucked his legs into a pretzel shape and pulled Dane's beating heart closer to his own. Their fingers would tangle, becoming a many legged shape, a poor facsimile of tentacles given life and light. But no matter how much he tried, the other Billy never managed to bottle it. Colour would always bleed through the cracks, a soul unstoppered, and the heartbeat would inevitably fade.

It was a memory that grew spikes to protect itself. Billy watched over it, just as he did with all of the other Billy's memories of Dane. He became an angel himself, in a way.

It was about time Dane had one.

Somewhere down the line it was this very idea that caused a spark in Billy. It started in his hands, as it once had before, and spread to his brain where it refused to leave.

Dane continued to be an intrusive thought that tripped him up constantly. So undeserved and so much like that light and airy hellish torment they had obfuscated about. It left Billy feeling like he was floating through his second life without something to anchor him, to drag him back under where it was cold and damp and familiar. It was a situation that could only have been made worse had the emotions that used to accompany these memories stayed as well.

But that was the thing.

Billy remembered it all, every isolated night spent together, every time Dane explained something ridiculous as though it was mundane. Every time Dane said his name-- _Billy, Billy, Billy_ \--while guiding him through an underbelly of London he was no longer blind to. The memories were all there, only they were missing the feelings that came with them. Those lived and died with the other Billy, left him now with just the facts. Dane had cupped the back of his neck once, his large hand all encompassing. Billy could recall how it felt, but not how it _felt_.

Memory had power immeasurable in this world. Enough that life forms created themselves out of nothing to keep them safe. Would it be so insurmountable for Billy to do the same? To create something from nothing? To create someone? A vessel that could house all of the memories Billy held inside of himself. A living, breathing container capable of giving back, reaching out, existing; the ultimate preservation.

Dane didn't deserve the ending he got. He was one name in a list of many, but it was only his that clung to Billy so fiercely. Dane had said that night, _but you also move on_ , so why was it that Billy couldn't?

Because Billy could bring him back.

A musical chime of glass sounded from somewhere very far away. Confirmation perhaps, a sign of the cross--shoulder, shoulder, head, sternum--in a language that spoke solely to Billy, giving him blessing.

Or a warning. _There are many Gods, youngling, but you were not reborn one of them_.

But what was a god, if not just something with the power to alter the universe?

Billy's hands sparked when he clenched them and time froze momentarily.

Nowadays Marge skimmed message boards about the previously fantastical like she was reading the morning paper, but she also had the spiritual benefit of a lifetime of pop culture secured under her belt. Numerous movie nights at Leon’s, time well spent watching classics like Re-Animator and delighting in the wonderfully macabre vision of a reanimated head going down on someone. Very much like Billy, she had a foot firmly in both worlds. And with that came objectivity.

“Do you think it’s a bad idea?” Billy asked at length.

He fiddled with his mug of tea, prepared for him builder-pale with too much milk. It was a relic of his past sweet tooth, now mysteriously gone missing. Just a subset of molecules he had lost somewhere in transit, one of the many hazards of being so casually reformed. He hadn’t told Marge it made him feel like a stranger in his own body, because she had sat down opposite him with a mug of her own she clearly didn’t want either. It was just what you did during difficult conversations.

“I think that you’re going to try it anyway,” Marge answered, the very picture of someone straddling a fence. It didn't escape either of them that Billy hadn’t offered this possibility for Leon, and maybe that said everything about morality right there. “I would have liked to meet him,” she added with a shrug, and it wasn’t really a teeter in either direction. Just sweet platitude, the kind given freely at a funeral.

“It won’t be him,” Billy said with a calm he wasn't close to feeling. “Not really. I get enough about this that I know Dane’s gone. Just like the other Billy with all the real memories of him. Technically, I never met the guy either. I just carry him around in my head like a eulogy for an empty coffin.”

Marge made a face at that. Less Switzerland and more disturbed. "Then why bother, Billy? When it gets right down to it, who is this really for?"

And that was the question, wasn’t it? Who would Dane be if it wasn’t the Kraken that made him? What if he was just an amalgamation of memories drip-filtered down from the rooms he’d been in, slept in, died in? Mixed back together with the clumsy hand of someone who never really knew him. If Billy gathered up only the pieces he thought the other Billy would have wanted to see preserved, willfully ignoring the flooded basement where Dane died, and died again, who would he really be benefitting? And what gave him the right to choose?

When Chaos Nazis played tug-of-war with Dane’s life, time and time again, it was the most unnatural process a body could go through. Blood rolling in reverse, shards of bone sinking back to rest under the muscle where they belonged. A kind of visceral horror that shattered the fourth wall completely. They were no longer watching a severed head grit it's teeth and talk, all from the comfort of their living room. No, this was reality for Dane.

Billy had been too late to stop it then-- _Dane, Dane, Dane_ \--and Dane had laughed through his weeping. Told Billy how good it was to see him while he rested at the base of his literal crucifixion site. Despite always being the martyr, Dane had been happy to be brought back in that moment. Had accepted Billy’s reaching hand, drudging him down from the depths, like it was a line thrown overboard.

Dane was kraken-bit when he died the final time. Physically changed, inside and out. Deep sea power, a gift from his God, tore unfettered at his seams. The whole of his eyes were the colour of drowned ink. It flowed through him, a salt laced transfusion of new blood that transformed him, but not nearly enough. Because, with Grisamentum's guidance, Dane still died from within, moving out. Too reminiscent of that dying light Billy once held in his hands.

Did Dane think it was a betrayal there at the end, not to be fully transformed? He had been the last of his kind to be bitten and quite possibly the least changed by the experience. Was destined to watch as the receptionists and clerks of his cult clawed their way up to a higher plane of existence, all while Dane’s lumbering mass remained mostly his own.

Raised a soldier since birth, Dane was one who regurgitated his granddad’s stories mainly at Billy’s bedside where it was quiet and warm, seconds from sleep, the often trod sounds similar to a lullaby. Never a lingering thought was spent over those fighting saints; the Blue-Rings, the Humboldts. Creatures with hunting arms and beaks for snapping. No, it was that pretty spiral that made Dane smile beautifully. Billy didn’t need the emotional trigger from his other’s memories to understand the importance of that, to soak up the warmth that provided and internalise it. To use it.

Billy took a long determined pull from his tea, sickly sweet, and said finally, “I’m doing it because the other Billy wouldn't. I owe him this. I owe both of them.”

Billy was unsure what became of Dane’s body after that night. It was possible whatever scraps of the Church of God Kraken remained came and retrieved its dead. Dane wasn’t the only one to die for its cause, after all. But the thought of what they might have done with it, with cremation presumably off the table--he remembered Dane’s words all too clearly, an unwanted gift to the sea, left to sink deep for an eternity, a crushing kind of black. It had never sounded much like heaven, not if you didn’t really want it. And to think of Dane there--it rubbed on Billy, a little bit more each day, until he was raw from the friction.

Asking Wati about it felt too much like a confession, a clear window into what he planned to do. It was always better to ask for forgiveness than permission and so he vowed that when all of this was over and Billy had succeeded, they would go to Wati together and ask the difficult questions.

Like, for one: how had Billy even managed this?

On his lunch break one unassuming afternoon, Billy got down on his hands and knees and dragged a specimen jar out from a dusty corner of storage. The bottle was cloudy with age but had never been used. Big enough that Billy had to heft it up onto his hip to carry it comfortably. Like a rotund baby, it was just as fragile. It wouldn’t hold a man of grown size and certainly not someone with Dane’s solidness, but it would do for what Billy had in mind.

He carried it with him for the rest of his shift, giving his walking tours of the Darwin Centre as though he was a single father dealing with a very clingy child. He would line the group up outside the grand finale room where the Architeuthis no longer rested--not that they knew what they were missing anymore--and he’d make them wait. There was no hired replacement for Dane, and the spot where he had stood guard was empty. Billy looked over anyway, at eye level, just like the other Billy had done for months.

The air of _not yet_ and _never_ hung over the spot like a miasma of doubt. Joined by a new heavyweight contender, _you’re too late_. But Billy ignored it, along with the curious looks, and went about his day as usual.

Once it was time to leave, Billy walked out with the jar still on his hip. The typical cold weather had parted like the seas and allowed for a run of balmy weeks. Everyone was out making the most of it, filling the courtyard in twos and threes, making noise in a low continuous hum. Trying as they might to outlive the coming day when the cold weather folded back over them all and swallowed them whole. No one paid Billy any attention.

Grass ran in tiered semi-circles up to the entrance, warmed by the sun that was just beginning to set. On the bottom most one Billy sat with the bottle on his lap to run an assessing hand over the outside of the glass. Gone were the cloudy smears that spoke of neglect and the slow drag of time getting away from us all, now there was a thin film of something oily and off-grey coating the inside surface. As Billy drew in close, nose to reflected nose, it condensed in a spot to form a single droplet. Just like sweat beading on skin, it rolled to the base of the bottle and nestled into the circular indent.

It was somehow exactly what Billy had hoped for but never expected to actually happen. Knacking in its most pure form.

“Well, fuck,” Billy said with a reckless bark of laughter. He lifted the bottle up towards the next person that passed him by too closely, _an obvious would you look at this shit_ , but they gave him a wide berth at the last second, as blind to the magic of the world as Billy himself had once been.

He brought the bottle back to his chest and cradled Dane between his hands, feeling a kind of awe that was brand new. Now more delicate than ever, Dane was a sliver of life gathered seemingly through sheer osmosis.

Billy Harrow smiled to himself; a god.

His first stop was the flat where it all began, Billy's own personalised haunting grounds. It was where the physical manifestations of light (Dane's hands) and life (Dane's heart) got so wrapped up in each other they became interchangeable in Billy's mind. The birthplace of the knack itself.

It looked the same from the outside but he shivered when he crossed over the threshold. The sensation a lot like stepping off into the deep end and immediately being plunged into waters that were ice cold, dead and devoid of all light. Even though you had been assured, again and again with gentle nudging and prayer, that your foot would meet resistance and allow you to walk across unharmed. He had been lied to before, tricked by Dane and blanketed knacking into thinking that this place, and all the other safe refuges, were frozen in time. Untouchable. But it was simply not true.

_There's a difference between being dead and being not born_ , Dane had said, way back then, and he was right. Being not born was so much worse.

The not born ghost that still lingered here had no past to look back fondly on, wasn't remembered by a loved one for a stupid in-joke only they could laugh at, they didn't have a favourite piece of clothing that Billy should feel bad about borrowing. And why should they? They never existed. Not like Leon, who had Marge to keep his memory alive. Not like Dane, with his broad shoulders and his large hands. No, not like Dane at all, who had Billy.

Dust coated all of the available surfaces. The trail of Billy's finger cut a line straight through a countertop and was the only evidence of any recent life. Something smelt off in the kitchen, old food that had withered and soured. Even the lamp post outside the window seemed dimmer, flickering like it was on its last legs. If there were rats scurrying around behind the walls, they might have been the only living thing for miles. Well, that and Billy himself, who stood where he had once dripped, and was now clutching a bottle that faintly dripped with the emerging molecules of his departed friend, hopeful and beyond tired.

Billy's arms were beginning to shake from the encumbrance and so he put the jar down where he wouldn't trip over it, and then disappeared into the bedroom to gather up what he would need to make a nest for sleeping on the floor. He bedded down right where he had that night and dragged the bottle onto Dane's spot. It towered over him in the same comforting way, all while it pulled unknowable things from out of the air and turned them into droplets on the other side of the glass.

It was the same grey coloured liquid as before and, in the hour that Billy laid there, it amassed about a squared centimetre of volume.

After a while the hanging silence got to be too much and Billy picked his way carefully across the room. He pulled a book from random off the shelf. It was a big tome on car repair that had so little to do with anything that it eventually soothed him to sleep, content in just knowing that it had at last been read.

The final trickles of the congregation had visited Billy at work for a short while, their lapels and jackets fronts glinting with the metallic pattern of little arms, reaching in a continuous circle. They would shroud themselves in his groups, sticking out sorely from his usual fair of overworked teachers, cautious first dates, and the dads that just didn't know what to do with their kid over the weekend. Each one would make a point to seek out Billy's eyes as though they were all secret members of the most punk-rock underground gang, eagerly hoping that like-recognised-like. But they would always find themselves disappointed. Billy had never been one of them, not really. His other was the one that touched the flesh of their god, pumped it full of preservatives, and encased it in glass. The Billy he was now had stood back and watched it die. It must have shown on his face somehow, his honest lack of responsibility, because eventually they stopped coming at all.

As Billy walked between the rows of now empty pews, he allowed himself to wonder about their eventual fate because, to anyone walking this same path, it would have been quite easy to convince them that the apocalypse had in fact happened.

Abandoned as though a strong wind had run rampant through it, the congregation was long gone. Rolled on to a different back room where the light of day struggled to reach, another aphotic hideaway where they can hopefully lick their salty wounds in peace. And without the repetition of echoed phonemes, meaningless phrases that bounced off the high ceilings and windowless walls to come back as a nonsense prayer, the Church of God Kraken now felt unceremoniously defeated.

The walls were no longer damp with their religious fervour, and the tangles of arms and squiddy flesh that hung like eccentric wallpaper came across almost sinful with no one left to praise it. The simplistic furniture facing the shaker-style altar were all of a sudden conspicuous next to everything else, lending the church to an off-kilter feeling. A place half sunk into the sea, well beyond saving.

It was also where Dane might have been at his happiest, the closest thing he had to a home.

Billy sat down on a pew at the back of the room and placed the jar at his side. The liquid that started to bead was the thickest yet, almost pure black in devout colour. Billy tucked his chin to his chest, a clumsy but well intentioned bow of his head, and waited. Affording Dane all the quiet space he needed in order to grieve for his fallen comrades.

With his eyes closed, it was easy for Billy to recall the first sermon his other had heard spoken out loud here. It posited that the gods didn't owe them anything. That this was their universe to do with what they pleased. We worship them simply because they are gods. We were not supposed to question it.

That was not how Billy saw it, at all.

He'd had some religious family growing up and so he was no stranger to being forced into respectful silences during the odd funeral. Rebellion at that age was thinking God didn't exist and that sitting still was stupid. His dad had shushed him a lot as a kid, in and out of churches, for various reasons. Billy had been something of a compulsive liar when he was younger, gliding charmingly boyish through most of his life that it remained fun far longer than it should have. All the way up to his first year at the centre, where he earned himself the nickname _Test-tube_ , funnily enough, with an odd twist of the truth. Billy had grown a lot since then, matured, averted an apocalypse. Arguably, he became a whole new person.

Rebellion was a streak, though, that survived matter reconfiguration.

He stayed just long enough to run through the original Star Trek theme in his head, the high pitched warbling of the theremin oddly fitting for this huge echoing hall. Then he scooped Dane up into his arms and walked out.

Billy roamed various streets idly wondering if Dane had ever walked down them. Not searching for anything in particular, just moving with the sway of growing liquid as daytime turned into afternoon.

At a point, Billy got the sense that London was helping him. Guiding him like Dane would have--had done--only without the touch of a hand on his lower back. It was never so overt that it happened while he was looking, more of a peripheral thing. A red string in a maze thing, making sure he didn't stray too far from his intended path. Bricks would tessellate behind his back, form new alleyways he'd never be able to trace the origins for on a map. A spluttering lightbulb here, an unusually low flying pigeon there; Billy was being corralled, a friend of London.

In the encroaching dark, the contents of the bottle were beginning to rage against itself. Now more than half filled, the consistency of the liquid had turned thicker, more viscous, climbing the walls of glass like echoes of many different arms, layered over and over to become a darker shade. Not quite the non-movement of ink yet, but well on its way.

It was also becoming heavier with each step Billy took and he welcomed the extra helping hand, regardless of whether London was entirely selfless in giving it over.

He was following the unnatural flutterings of a crisp packet, at least a decade old in faded style, when he realised where he was being led. Billy stopped dead but inertia had him stumbling another step; Dane thrashing up like a wave before then becoming eerily still like the surface of a deep lake inside the bottle.

Billy had admittedly been out of his mind when he'd last made this journey, a mess of unintentional time stops, his phaser deliberately not set on stun. He hadn't noticed their trajectory now until they had passed the garage on the corner, and then suddenly it was all too familiar. They were in the far eastern side of London, heading towards an empty building with a flooded basement.

He didn't want to go back there, that was certain. Didn't want to subject Dane to that kind of torment ever again. But then, what was Dane without his stubbornness? His perpetual martyrdom? His willingness to fight and claw and keep coming back for more?

Billy wanted Dane fully and wholeheartedly, he was quickly coming to realise this. He wanted him to not be missing huge chunks of himself that were ripped out in death. Sliced and gutted. With memories of the damage done to him so visceral that his throat still burned long after it had knitted itself back together. But maybe the only way Billy could have Dane even close to the version he never got to meet was to take the bad with the good.

_Good and bad simply ain't things that concern it_ , Dane had said, and it was quite possible he hadn't just been talking about his god. Maybe once everything was stirred together, irreversibly interwoven, it didn't matter what piece went where, just that together they created a whole. A person, neither good or bad, just there to love and be loved back.

It was a nice thought and one that was entirely hokey. But it got Billy moving again, through some deserted streets, lit by the brightest streetlights he'd ever encountered. They guided him in like a plane coming into land. Down curving concrete steps that were still slick with seawater. And further still into the boring, regular kind of hell.

Billy was thankful to find the walls barren when he reached the bottom. Freed at last from their twisted idolatry, their own worshiped sea being coloured red with blood and swastika. It was bad enough the universe was telling him to be here, but to sit and reflect under that shit, Billy wasn't sure he could have done it.

The lid of the jar rattled as he moved further in, the sound close to chattering teeth, an uncontrollable reaction to fear or the cold. Billy tightened his grip on the glass, hoping to be a comfort to them both. Because there, right in front of them, was the spot where Dane had died and died again. Weirdly, the Chaos Nazis had taken the time to dismantle the makeshift rack they'd hung him on, and now it sat a haphazard pile of wood. If Dane had stained it with his blood during that time, the flood of seawater that came with Billy's rescue must have cleansed it, a ritual purification that he hoped expanded to fill the room.

But that was not to say there still wasn't horror to be found here, because there was. The tear tracks that had ruddied up Dane's face, the grin he had greeted Billy with, the refracted angle of his shoulders not sitting quite right, the scrape of his voice, the cut of his eyes. It all came back to Billy in a rush, a physical haunting. He hadn't been there for Dane, but things were different now.

Billy drifted to his knees slowly. He placed the jar in front of himself, right where it had happened. He kept his hands either side of the bottle and tipped forward, brought his forehead to the glass and let his breath fog up the surface, warm hitting cold. It was a poor apology, not nearly enough, could never be enough. But it was all he had. Billy brushed his lips over the container where Dane was straining his hardest just to exist, very briefly returning an old whisper-- _Dane, Dane, Dane_ \--then he pulled away, sat back on his heels and watched in renewed awe as liquid started to gather.

Here, in this unholy place, it ran down the walls like water from a tap, as crystalline as tears. It was diluting the rest of Dane at an alarming pace, bad leaking into good, churning together as one. It frightened Billy to no end, but he let it happen. Scrubbed at his own damp face in solidarity while shifting to fit Dane between the frame of his open legs. He kept the palms of his hands in contact with the jar the whole time, offering up his own blanket of faith. Like the towering comfort of Dane or Marge's too sugary cup of tea--whatever it was that people did while trying to help--he offered a semblance of that, mostly just by sitting with Dane when he wasn't able to before.

Dane's final death happened in a factory behind locked iron gates. Billy walked past it on his way home with a glass jar threatening to spill over with collected memories.

The bathroom in Billy's flat was a cramped little thing with a half bath half shower taking up most of the space. It had never been remodelled, in all the time he had lived there. Doomed to forever be a muddy kind of blue that resembled the sky just before an unwanted rainfall.

As a potential place of holy resurrection, it was somewhat lacking.

Billy placed Dane down on the closed toilet lid, in lieu of a better spot, then stood back with his hands on his hips, just thinking. It wouldn't do well to think too deeply, he knew this. The more Billy turned things over in his mind, the less chance he had at getting it to work. Spidering branches of possibilities were shriveling up with every wasted second, becoming deadened foliage in the deepest part of winter. A cat that was indisputably dead in a box.

Leon was _gone_ in an instant, his fate as a being both born and dead, a chilling silence about him in either state. Dane needed to be his opposite; _here_ , many times reborn, and not dead. Surrounded by noise; the _tink-tink_ of nails on a glass wrapping being returned by a shape that then loomed out of the darkness. What Billy hoped would be a friendly call and response.

Well, that was the plan, anyway.

Billy reached over and stoppered the bathtub. He recalled the criss-cross pattern of his and Dane's fingers, how light had bled through the gaps and escaped into the ether to become little more than empty particles. He didn't want small parts of Dane disappearing down the drain, his preference for orange over red, perhaps, or the borrowed cadence of his granddad's hallowed stories. Billy had learnt a lot from his other's past mistakes and vowed to do better.

With that done, Billy turned back to the jar. He removed the lid and stared into the whirling sea of his friend. It gave off the distinct feeling that it was staring back. Billy smiled his most reassuring smile.

Lifting the bottle at this point took all of Billy's strength, and then some. Dane was all shaved head and fat muscle and Billy had always been too skinny, too fragile, too weak. But he managed it now, with the help of his misplaced gifts, to bring the lip of the jar to the rim of the bathtub and tilt it forward. Dane flowed not like any other liquid. He was denser for a start, more oil than water. A shower of black with the odd hint of silvery light, chased finally by a dull grey that together encapsulated Dane fully. Billy poured and poured long after the bottle should have logically emptied. It only seemed to end once the bathtub was suitably filled. For what purpose, only Billy and the universe knew.

As he toed off his shoes he briefly considered calling up Marge, just to have her sit in the other room. He'd put on Flatliners or The Frightners while she waited and let the dickish comedy of that really stagnate beyond depth. But it wouldn't be fair to have her waiting without end in the place where Leon had died. She wouldn't resent Billy for his choice in following through with his insane plan, but it was still too much to ask. Especially considering he wasn't exactly sure what was about to happen. It wasn't his intention to kill himself tonight, quite the opposite in fact, but he suspected there were still a lot of ways this could go wrong. Had witnessed half-deaths in many forms since meeting Dane, tortured existences endlessly worse off than any hypothetical kraken hell. If Dane really was up there, where it was weightless and warm--

Before he could talk himself out of it, Billy climbed into the bathtub fully clothed.

He broke the surface tension of death first with a socked foot, then with his whole body.

Physics apparently played no part in this act as the water level didn't rise with the added mass. Nothing was displaced and Billy lowered himself until he was completely saturated in black. In Dane, he corrected, in whatever the form he had currently taken.

There wasn't enough room for Billy to stretch his legs out and so his knees poked comically out of the top, looking like twin blue jean mountains in a mirror-universe Bob Ross painting. Billy rested his arms on the sides of the bath, waiting for the liquid to settle around him, to become glossy again on the surface. Wanting desperately for some unknown reason--almost perversely--to see his own face reflected in Dane. Maybe wishing to see that he had a place here in this landscape, somewhere special carved out, just for him.

But instead, what stared back was a void. Billy was sitting in his own manufactured vortex that was threatening to swallow him whole. Lucky for him, that was exactly what he wanted.

He filled his lungs with air and then took a brief moment to listen out for any musical chimes of glass--a godly _best of luck_ \--but all he heard was the rushing of water in his ears, pumping along like blood. A siren roar to return home, which he had no choice but to follow.

Billy leant back and submerged himself fully.

For the longest time it felt like he was flat on his back in a bathtub. Counting the seconds until his lungs burnt out and sheer stubbornness had him drowning in his own grubby bathroom. He could feel his extremities beginning to cramp, cold seeping into his bone marrow, up his nose, in his ears, making his eardrums flex, numbing him, changing him, bringing him to the point where he wouldn't be able to fight it off, he was dying, freezing, someone would eventually find him here, a body eroded by a sea of his own making, they would put him behind glass, a fitting end, a circular kind of death, one that never ended for him, he was--

Something shifted underneath his back, fell away, and Billy was sinking deeper. Far beyond the constraints of his bathtub. Into a world that coexisted alongside his own, much like the wall Dane had shattered in order to usher him into a new reality, all that time ago. A door abruptly opened when Billy wasn't expecting it, a tumbling welcome.

Billy sank down, down and down. Into the deepest trench, and deeper still.

This was where the countless different gods and saints roamed, did battle, and lived out their millennia. If someone had prayed to it once then, chances are, it was down here somewhere. Well fed creatures with ribbons for arms, spiralling as they digested a decade. The liturgy uttered by Dane's granddad might have been food for so many, fuelling their hunts well after he had passed. It was what most people would call a legacy, but what squid worshippers probably thought of as only their duty.

Billy was still wearing his glasses, all the better to see the endless sea that floated all around him. An unfathomable space, the dead centre of a black hole twisting and reshaping everything that drifted into its grasp. Like Billy, for one, helplessly caught up in its current. He felt both stretched and condensed at the same time, everywhere and nowhere. Dead and alive, as well as all the states in between. Dane was here somewhere, Billy was certain of that. Could feel the phantom thump of his heart against the palms of his hands like the swing of a compass needle. Not just a series of drips harvested from a rain gutter, no, physically Dane was here, trapped in the same limbo, waiting to be pulled out.

Billy moved without moving, a very squiddy thing to do. He kicked his legs, weighed down in his wet jeans, and he curled his arms in a swimming motion, but neither seemed to gain him any traction. The sea moved around him instead, a planet in orbit, and on one of these rotations he saw, in the distance, a far off star. The light from it hit Billy's eyes like sunlight glinting off a watch face. Very deliberate, a _come and get me_ taunt.

Relief flooded Billy, tightened in his gut. Time flowed different down here, but in that moment it stopped. Resumed only when Billy had to blink.

He would know that light anywhere, its intensity and its shine. He drank Dane in, a tiny dot that was rapidly getting bigger, more detailed, until eventually Billy could pick out the distinction of human arms and legs, wide shoulders and a solid bulk. All the parts that together made up his friend.

Dane's eyes were firmly shut against the sting of salt, seeking out no one, but Billy could wait--had waited--could wait a little bit more.

The moment he was close enough Billy wrapped his hand around Dane's wrist. Worried, with a dash of hysteria, that if he missed his chance they would be like two ships passing each other in the night, cursed to never meet again. To his surprise, Dane was warm to his touch, so clearly thrumming with life. A guitar string that had been plucked in death and continued to reverberate long into the afterlife. That was Dane, alright, obstinate through and through.

Bioluminescence bloomed once more from Dane's fingertips, a steady pulsing light, just as wonderfully bizarre as it had always been. Billy cupped his hands around it from pure instinct, a handshake hello--technically close enough to being their first meeting that this was true--only far more intimate. He ran his hands up Dane's arms, down the unrelenting strength of his chest, back up to his neck, ending at the curve of his jaw. Mapping what he knew to be Dane from borrowed memories, and reaffirming to himself that the real thing was right here in front of him.

Knacking had brought them together, over and under the trivialities of death. It was amazing to think they had managed it once, let alone numerous times. But here was the evidence, preserved in his hands. A miracle of his own creativity and the universe's willingness to listen.

Time did yet another funny little hop and a skip when Billy realised, at some point during this process, the void had started staring back. Abyssal eyes in a neutral face, Dane was watching him, tracking him, taking Billy in. A swirling black, they matched the scenery and gave the impression you could look right through him. These were the eyes that Dane died with, plucked straight out of the air in the time it took Billy to walk past a factory. He shuddered looking into them but at the same time didn't dare shy away. He wanted all of Dane, and he meant it, every last haunted piece.

Then, just like Dane was choosing to go right back to his eternal slumber, they simply shut again. Cut Billy off mid thought, like a taut string going slack. A simple rejection, so freely given that Billy struggled to find an answer.

Precious air escaped him as he tried to say Dane's name, it bubbled out of his mouth and blocked his view in a stream flowing upwards. He pulled himself in closer, his fist grabbing a handful of Dane's sodden shirt. He was making no sound for all of his effort and, in the end, just settled with putting his forehead to Dane's without the slick barrier of glass between them.

_Then okay. Convince me._ Billy heard it echo in his head at the contact, a possible feedback loop, words that belonged to Dane’s other for a change. Words that now had new connotations.

All Billy had to give was air, and so he gave that.

He brushed his lips against Dane's, cold meeting warm. A chaste touch that he held and held until miraculously he felt Dane's mouth open under his. And with that tentative permission given at last, Billy broke. He poured everything he had into Dane, all his pent up passion and fraught anxiety, flowing into a willing vessel that then gave back equally, in turn.

Large hands came up and clutched at the nape of Billy's neck. A wave of _finally_ washed over him. The culmination of everything overwhelming. That feeling of having a word on the tip of your tongue _finally_ revealed to you, the revelation of a physical touch being translated into an emotional language that _finally_ made sense. Dane kissed him back like mutual recognition, the most obscure puzzle pieces finding similar edges. Neither one of them was quite like what they once were, damaged and re-energized wrong. But they fit together now, regardless of the odds. Not quite seamless, but good enough.

A feeling of buoyancy filled Billy's core. They were floating, lifting, drudging themselves out of the depths, intending to return to some middle ground where neither of the holy extremes could reach them. Sensation was returning to his limbs, bringing with it the static of pins and needles. He clung to Dane, was dragging him up too, up and up, and out and out--

Billy burst through the surface tension of death with an almighty gasp of air. Wet hair hung limp over his eyes and he was coughing up water that ran in black trickles down his chin. He heaved himself over the edge of the bathtub and hit the floor with a drenched sounding slap. He cracked the bowl of the toilet with his elbow as he scrambled back to his knees, a shooting pain that he ignored in favour of plunging his arms back into the freezing deep.

His nails bounced off plastic coating, jarring his very soul. It was a dull tone that rang nothing like the clear comfort of glass because he heard no response, just his own animal noises as he clawed at the base of the bathtub. For a brief second, he reached further down and fabric touched lightly against his fingertips. Billy pounced, held on tight and threw his body backwards.

Dane was able to break the surface tension of death only with Billy's help, a long and arduous journey that _finally_ had an end in sight.

If the bath was too small for Billy before then Dane eclipsed it. His huge frame having been dragged across the different planes of existence so suddenly, that he apparently jumpstarted physics back into the properties of liquids. What was once a sea of Dane's molecules was now just a dirty coloured bath, and the displaced water surged over the rim to drown Billy's socks, a delayed reaction. The express result of Billy’s relaxed chokehold on the universe.

Billy didn't care, Billy didn't even notice.

Because Dane was actually here with him at last, in Billy's tiny bathroom, also spilling half over the edge of the tub, where Billy's fatigued fingers had been forced to let him go. He was still wearing the clothes he had died in; something dark, fit for a final confrontation, but had now looped around into being off-coloured robes of a resurrection. Dane had come back solid all over and he was throwing up black, an oily kind of mucus so different from what had birthed him. Frantic on the inhale like he couldn't quite believe he had breath at all.

What Dane was violently bringing up must have been the dregs of Grisamentum, now powerless ink being forcibly shaken from his lungs with wracking coughs and spasms in his diaphragm. It looked painful, as dark as the process that had killed him, but it had to be done. Billy curled in as close as he could, sweeping against the grain of Dane’s buzzed hair and down the curve of his spine. Hands that had previously given life, now appropriately being used to heal.

"Dane,” Billy said in a voice that cracked from disuse. “Dane, Dane, Dane.”

It was a simple ceremony Billy had created, mainly because he felt he had no right to give a krackenist salute; saying Dane’s name on repeat like a gentle refrain. Billy had kept it up throughout, a prayer in their own shared language, one he hoped had kept Dane well fed during his sojourn.

With one last upheaval, Dane collapsed back, panting. Water sloshed, beat a chaotic rainwall down onto the floor, and then it was over. Dane’s keloid peppered arm clutched at the side of the bath, tense then slack, a continuous cycle that sometimes flared with colour, with light, without him even meaning to. Billy drew towards it like a magnet, propped his chin on top, and waited. Waited for Dane’s eyes to peel open and train on him.

His pupils were drained completely of their squid ink marinade and they took a moment to focus on Billy, to transpose him here under similar but different fluorescent lights, instead of on a factory floor where their other’s would have last seen each other.

Dane tried to speak but his throat was wrecked, the roughest debris at the bottom of a still lake. It sounded a little like Billy’s name and so Billy nodded, dug his chin deeper into the muscle of Dane’s arm. Dane gave a weak laugh in response, a disbelieving scoff. He shook his head, at last taking in the room and the absurdity of the bathtub that had somehow been his coffin. “The shit you come up with, Billy,” he _finally_ croaked, fond, eyes coming back to rest on him.

Billy kissed a scar, and then another. Surprise colored Dane’s face, but only for a second, before he turned his arm over and presented more scars.

Squids miraculously have three hearts, a fact that Billy shared with Dane countless times over the years that followed. Dane already knew this, of course, but didn’t mind hearing it again and again, usually at Billy's bedside, seconds from sleep.


End file.
